This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Ruby shrugs off the idea that the device is either a surprise or has the power to incriminate. “I am bright enough to recognize a tape recorder,” he says drolly to Sachs.

Not that the judge has said anything contentious. The professional listener sits across from my friends Jesse Brown and Katie Minsky, untangling their moral/political positions. Brown espouses the notion of young people voting behind individual issues, rather than buying into a bundling of beliefs, a polarizing allegiance to the left or right.

Article Continued Below

Ruby cuts through the verbal red tape.

“I think it’s all abstractly meaningless,” he pipes in, “There are people who do good in the world. And there are people who do not. And we make judgments.”

Ruby has the advantage on us, not just for being the lauded lawyer with a history of tackling high-profile civil rights cases. But because, for every two glasses of wine we drink, he drinks one.

Earlier in the week, a restaurateur had given me a rundown on Ruby’s tastes: rare meat, fancy mushrooms, Asian spicing and Diet Pepsi.

I thought I was being punked with this last detail. But Ruby is delighted when I offer him a diet Pepsi, and respectful when I choose not to reveal my source. He says that his first time being drunk, as a young student, put him off the experience entirely. He adores each of the four bottles of wine he’s brought. But, after half a glass of each, he switches to cola.

For a little spice, I’ve experimented with a mussel and gochujang soup, based on a recent dish I had in a restaurant. The bright orange liquid is puréed with lots of butter and parsnips, garnished with a bit of pork shoulder.

Ruby joins me at the stove as I cook sweetbreads. While the low heat of the cast iron pan slowly crisps their skin, he tells me about Lucy, the Edmonton Valley Zoo elephant he’s trying to have released to a sanctuary.

Honey mushrooms and rare slices of inch-thick rib-eye hold less interest for him than the jus they’re coated in. I blush a bit as he voices his appreciation for the three-day sauce-making process, cleaning his plate of every last drop.

A smiling, roundish man with wispy grey hair, Ruby evokes Sydney Greenstreet’s line from The Maltese Falcon: “Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously. Unless you keep in practice.”

Conversation turns back to morality, of political allegiance and health care. Ruby hotly debates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the individual (without crediting Star Trek’s Spock).

Brown argues that caring for humanity begins at home. “I think it starts with your immediate circle,” counters Brown. “And I don’t know what you can say about someone who neglects the people around them for some greater concept of the social good that they’re doing.”

Ruby cites Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. as two examples of great men who were terrible fathers. He says that we can’t judge King by how he treated his family,“Because he achieved more than any other human being of our generation. He made the world a better place in a zillion ways.”

Sachs jumps in, tempering his zeal.

“Speaking as a woman who’s dated left men, that’s a real problem.” For teasing Ruby, she gets a high-five from Minsky. “So good with everyone else, not good with women in their immediate circle.”

Sachs and Ruby have a crackling energy between them, taking joy in their respectful disagreements.

Not wanting to pass up free legal advice, I show the couple a photo of a woman kneeling down to pet some baby ducks, while behind her, an adult duck dips its beak into her purse, several bills clutched in its mouth.

Ruby says he’d defend the duck. “I think it’s clear that that duck is doing the right thing,” he says, “putting the money back where it belongs.”

Not if I were on that jury. That duck would be found “confit.”

Delivered dailyThe Morning Headlines Newsletter

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com